I have ~1 YOE shipping “high impact” iOS features at an IPO’d unicorn/mid sized company. However, I feel a bit stagnated and bored aligning rounded buttons and using the restrictive APIs. The pay is alright, but working exclusively with Obj-C and Swift feels like I’m pigeonholing my career to be too dependent on Apple’s success. And I have no intention of going to Apple; I don’t think the culture there is healthy. Should I switch to a new tech/platform or just stick with iOS until Apple bites the dust? TC = 165k
1 yoe and already tired? I bet you still have no idea what iOS is about and never reached in depth knowledge with it. I’m afraid that pattern will repeat with any domain you’re gonna master.
I don’t deny that there’s parts of the field that I haven’t been exposed to since starting professionally (been on the platform since 2014). But having built + co-architected many layers of a non-trivial 50M+ MAU iOS app (custom networking framework, secure state persistence, view/transport models, interaction/perf metrics, A/B testing system, custom cloud-based test automation system...) I’ve noticed that the largest annoyances come from the iOS APIs and tooling above anything else. But if you mean in-depth knowledge as in re-writing libdispatch or the Obj-C compiler then yes I have much to learn in that regard... but my question in the OP still stands.
So basically you’re good with storyboards?
I also thought that I would never join apple, but it’s honestly great here and I’m glad my path brought me to this point. Also you haven’t even cracked the surface of iOS with only 1 YOE. Give it some time. I really didn’t get an appreciation for Swift until I was about 3 years in
Agree to disagree. I was at Apple for 1.5 years and it was the worst time of my life, but probably very team dependent.
iOS and Android devs are more in-demand than other fields. You should stick with it
Depends on long term ambitions. If you are big company person, being a specialist is typically more valuable. 1 year isn't a lot of experience though so you can easily switch to another role if you're curious to experiment still. If you are a small company person, being a generalist is typically more valuable. Full stack mobile is pretty good skill set to have. At some point I want to pick up some mobile skills. I did about 5 years of full stack web before moving into infra for last few years and it is useful experience to have, and if I want to go somewhere small again I'll be able to do just about anything that needs to be done.
React native bro
RN sux ass
Me too thanks
Move to a company where other engineers are more knowledgeable than you.
Never stop learning new things
Most people with 1-2 yoe will claim to be experts in java Node.js swift android iOS aws etc. you are not alone.
do backend, distributed system, more challenging and more fun (at least to me)
Why not do server side in addition to doing iOS? You don’t have to be exclusive to one tech or another. I imagine there’s a server side component to your iOS app, whether it’d be in python, java, ruby, etc. Ask your employer for work, starting on the api layer